THE ETERNALLY FRUSTRATING YET FASCINATING GAME OF BASEBALL.

During the regular season, the Milwaukee Brewers won all six games they played facing the Brooklyn Trolley, now Los Angeles, Dodgers.  Those wins bracketed the All-Star break, part of a long winning streak that put the Crew atop the division without paying off in hamburgers.  The hamburgers came later.

Five of those six games were close, sometimes determined by the relief pitchers.  In the first, though, the Crew chased starting pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto in 2/3 of an inning, which might have been how one awakens a sleeping giant and fills him with a terrible resolve.  The other five Dodgers who took losses: Clayton Kershaw, Kirby Yates, Tyler Glasnow, Emmet Sheehan, and Lou Trivino, who finished the season with the Phillies.

Come the league championship series and a very different lineup of pitchers hopped off the trolley.  In the first game, last year's Cy Young winner Blake Snell, who was 1-1 after an August 2 game with Tampa Bay, had his changeup working so well that the Brewer approach of taking pitches and fouling off pitches wasn't feasible.  In the second game, the aforementioned Mr Yamamoto served a lead-off home run to Jackson Churio, then posted the next 27 outs allowing all of two hits and a walk.  The way the league champion series are set up, the higher seeded team has the first two games and the final two games, if necessary, at home.

In the third game, at Los Angeles, Mr Glasnow started, relieved after 5 2/3 innings by Alex Vesia.  Rising fireballer Jacob Misiorowski might have gotten his name into the record books posting nine strikeouts in five innings: unfortunately between the Brewers not able to get to woodpecking against Dodger pitchers and some fielding errors, it was Mr Misiorowski taking the loss.

That, dear reader, set the table for Shohei Ohtani.  I don't know if "nine strikeouts, hold my beer" is a fitting introduction.  "As a pitcher, Ohtani struck out the side to open the game against the Milwaukee Brewers, then—as a hitter—walked to the plate and smashed a 446-foot home run which nearly left Dodger Stadium. That’s a hell of a way to start the game."  It only got better for Trolley Dodger fans after that.

Over the course of 2 hours, 41 minutes, in front of 52,883 fans, with millions watching domestically and tens of millions more in Japan, Ohtani threw six shutout innings and struck out 10 in between hitting three home runs that traveled a combined 1,342 feet, including one that left Dodger Stadium entirely. It was the sort of game that happens in comic books, not real life -- and it was a game that completed a championship series sweep and sent Los Angeles to its second consecutive World Series. It was the kind of night that leaves patrons elated they saw it and also just a little ruined because they know they'll never see anything like it again. Everyone was a prisoner, captive to perhaps the greatest individual game in the quarter-million or so played over the last century and a half.

It was, at very least, one of the finest displays of baseball since the game's inception, up there with Tony Cloninger hitting two grand slams and throwing a complete game in 1966 or Rick Wise socking two home runs amid his no-hitter on the mound in 1971. And unlike those, this came in the postseason, and in a game to clinch Los Angeles the opportunity to become the first team in a quarter-century to win back-to-back championships.

Mr Ohtani is the first pitcher to hit a home run in a league championship series game since Brandon Woodruff hit one in Milwaukee off Clayton Kershaw (who did not face a batter in the recently concluded series) in the 2018 league championship series.  Since then, the National League and American League have standardized the rules establishing designated hitters, intentional walks, and automatic runners to expedite regular season extra innings games.  No doubt, somewhere a language arts teacher at Bell Junior High who coached cross-country for Milwaukee Hamilton approves: he vented about pitchers being "wasted" bunting or striking out,  and about throwing those outside pitches for intentional walks, and he might have carried on about replacement without re-entry, which is what compels the expediting of extra innings.

But if professional baseball has codified the designated hitter protocol, why is Mr Ohtani even batting, let alone being the Schrödinger quantum player who is in the game and out of the game?

In baseball history, 503 players have hit three home runs in a game, and 1,550 have struck out 10 or more in a game. None, until Friday, had done both. And that's what Shohei Ohtani does, who he is. For eight years, he has transformed what is possible in baseball, set a truly impossible standard to match, and now, finally, having signed with a franchise capable of giving his talents the largest stage, Ohtani gets to perform when it matters most.

Milwaukee won more games during the regular season than anyone. Regardless of how impotent the Brewers' offense was this series, they were a very good team, and the Dodgers flayed them.

There's apparently a Shohei Ohtani provision in the current rules of baseball under which he can start as a pitcher and as a designated hitter and remain the designated hitter even when relieved on the mound.  That might address an anomaly in the designated hitter rule under which pinch hitting for a designated hitter makes that spot in the order the pitcher's spot, but if a team has a pretty good hitting pitcher (there are a few) why not offer the same quantum player consideration to him?

The night was enough to induce the rending of garments and the gnashing of teeth in Babylon.

Baseball fans across the country rent their garments and cried out in anguish tonight, asking the Almighty God how long they must suffer after the Los Angeles Dodgers swept the Milwaukee Brewers to once again advance to the World Series.

The nation, which took the Dodgers' victory as further evidence that America continues to live under God's wrathful judgment, lifted up a collective lament to ask the Lord when He would turn away from his anger and strike down the unrighteous.

"How long, O Lord, will the wicked prosper?" one sorrowful fan was heard shouting as he wept. "They pour out arrogant words, all the evildoers boast. They crush other teams, O Lord, and afflict our favorite franchises. When will you let us see your face again, God? When will we be saved from the Dodgers?"

Seattle's current team will play Toronto's Blue Jays for the right to face the Dodgers in the World Series.